Big Vicious is the electric band of trumpeter Avishai Cohen, born May 23, 1978 in Tel Aviv. It is not the band of the Israeli double bassist of the same name, born 1970, who is profiled separately on this site; the two musicians are unrelated, and Discogs keeps them apart as separate artist entries with an explicit warning printed on the trumpeter's page. Cohen started the group in 2014, after roughly two decades in the United States, when he moved back to Israel. The idea he brought to it was a mirrored rhythm section: two guitars, two drum kits, and a trumpet run through effects, playing instrumental songs built on rock riffs rather than heads and solos. He had been circling something like it since about 2007, during his New York years.

The personnel came out of two sets of long friendships. Guitarist Uzi Ramirez, born Uzi Feinerman, went to the same Tel Aviv arts high school as Cohen and had spent the intervening years in the Balkan-surf band Boom Pam and on his own blues and Americana records. Guitarist and bassist Yonatan Albalak and drummer Aviv Cohen, both raised in Jerusalem and neither related to the trumpeter, had been playing together since the early 2000s in LayerZ, Geshem and the Tel Aviv beat-scene circle around the Raw Tapes label. For its first years the quartet worked live in Israel, playing covers and testing arrangements without recording. A video of the band backing singer Netta Barzilai on a version of Sean Paul's "Get Busy," posted June 21, 2018, catches that lineup with a single drummer.

Later in 2018 Cohen added Ziv Ravitz on drums and live sampling, with a brief to carry some of the sound of Cohen's acoustic quartet into the electric band. Making two drummers work took longer than anyone expected. "We planned on recording a few years ago, but it took awhile to find the right aesthetics and figure out how to play properly with the two drummers," Cohen said. Ravitz described the solution as a refusal to divide the kit work into assigned parts: "We decide what the music needs and not what drum part is needed. We follow the idea of the song." The band took to reviewing tapes of its own concerts in detail, a habit Cohen compared to analysing soccer games.

The studio debut came together in two places. Writing sessions were held at the Tel Aviv studio of producer Rejoicer (Yuvi Havkin), who ended up with a co-composing credit on three pieces, and the record was cut in August 2019 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines in the south of France, produced by Manfred Eicher. Big Vicious was released March 27, 2020 as ECM 2680, Cohen's fourth album for the label. Eleven tracks run just over 50 minutes: nine originals, five of them credited to the band collectively, plus two covers, Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" and Massive Attack's "Teardrop," which at 7:24 is the longest thing on the record. ECM issued "Honey Fountain" as a single on February 7, 2020 and "Teardrop" on March 13, the latter with an official video. Albalak's account of the sessions gives Eicher an unusually direct hand: "Manfred's contribution changed a lot. He'd say something and it could change the essence of a piece." The sleeve is a painting of the five musicians on a dark stage, a rarity in a label catalog built on landscape photography and abstraction.

Reviews were warm rather than unanimous. Justin Vellucci in PopMatters gave it 7 out of 10 and heard "acid-psych wandering, low-boil ambiance and smoky jazz signatures," singling out Cohen's playing on the closer "Intent." Wif Stenger in Jazz Journal praised the range of Cohen's tone, from "warm burnished" to "piercing, triumphant flight," while calling much of the album "pleasant but hardly adventurous," with "Fractals" the highlight and "King Kutner" the weak spot. Ian Mann at The Jazz Mann made the same complaint about emotional range and predicted the material would hit harder live. The most consistently praised track has been the "Teardrop" arrangement, a tune Cohen said "you can stay in forever."

No second album has followed. Cohen's ECM releases since, Naked Truth (2022) and Ashes to Gold (2024), are the work of his acoustic quartet with Yonathan Avishai, Barak Mori and Ravitz, not of this band, a distinction worth making because Ravitz holds a chair in both groups. Big Vicious has stayed a working touring band through the 2020s with its personnel intact: an Oslo date at Cosmopolite on April 27, 2022, the Rochester International Jazz Festival, and a set at the Ottawa Jazz Festival on June 25, 2026 in the Azrieli Studio at the National Arts Centre.

The band's organizing principle is doubling. Two guitars and two kits let the same line be played twice with slightly different weight, and the writing leans on repetition and reduction rather than on the theme-and-solos shape of a jazz set. Cohen takes almost no extended solos on the album; the trumpet works as a lead voice inside the arrangements, treated with effects and set against Ravitz's live sampling, and the tracks run three to five minutes like songs. Cohen has been blunt about where the players come from: "We're all coming from jazz, but some of us left it earlier. Everyone's bringing in their backgrounds, and that becomes part of the sound of the band." Those backgrounds are blues and surf rock in Ramirez's case, post-rock and electronica in Albalak's and Aviv Cohen's, and a straight jazz pedigree in Ravitz's. Critics have reached for Miles Davis's electric period as the closest reference point, though the more audible neighbours are Massive Attack, whose "Teardrop" the band covers, and the psychedelic and post-rock end of the Tel Aviv scene. Set against the rest of Cohen's discography, Big Vicious is the loud half: his ECM quartet records are spare, slow and composerly, and this group is the one built for volume and groove.